Unlike most book collectors, I know the exact year, month, and day that I started my collection. I almost know the hour. It was sometime on the morning of December 25, 1977, for it was that Christmas that I tore open the wrapping paper to find a leatherbound, boxed edition of the Lord of the…
The late great Donald B. Westlake once said, “New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it.” Westlake, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and three-times Edgar Award…
There’s a fairy tale that’s a strong motif in The Woods—a tale that my main character Tess doesn’t want to remember. A fairy tale, the very name conjures up the image of a magical story that begins with once upon a time and ends happily ever after. But the fairy tale in my book is…
Table Mountain towers over the skyline of Cape Town like a monolith. When the Dutch settlers first arrived here in 1652 they contemplated digging a canal around the cape into an island, separating their colony from ‘Darkest Africa’. The city itself isn’t actually that big: you can comfortably walk from one side to the other…
We see it all the time in suspense fiction. The good guy takes down the villain and does some variation of riding off into the sunset, such as setting sail in the Caribbean (The Firm), slipping quietly into Mexico (The Shawshank Redemption) or beginning a new life in obscurity (The Town). But in the digital…
We teamed up with five cozy mystery writers to create a short story in real-time. The end result was “Sweet Voodoo Magic” which you can read in full below! A special thank you goes out to the participating authors (in order of appearance): Hannah Dennison, S.C. Perkins, Donna Andrews, Diane Kelly, and Ellie Alexander. The…
If handled properly, the setting of a story can serve almost like a character in itself, one that readers look forward to visiting, time and time again. James Lee Burke’s New Iberia, Stephen King’s Castle Rock, and Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles are all as familiar and comfortable to longtime fans as their own hometowns. Conversely,…
In early 1996, I finally landed my first agent, a wonderful woman named Pam Bernstein, who shopped my debut thriller around to several publishers, all of whom turned it down because the book needed editorial work. Pam suggested an independent editor read the book, and she had just the person in mind—a man by the…
An hour’s bus ride from Serbia’s capital Belgrade lies Novi Sad, Vojvodina. Unlike the capital’s brutalist, graffiti-covered apartment blocks, Novi Sad’s got a more baroque look thanks to its history as part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. There, as the sun set over a gothic church on the main square I walked into a café…
Elsa Hart stops by to share eight of her favorite crime short stories. Add these to your TBR, and also make sure to save room for The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, the first book in a new atmospheric mystery series set in 1703 London—a time when the old approaches to science coexist with the new,…
